GLOUCESTER, MASS.- On June 30, the Cape Ann Museum (CAM) in Gloucester, Massachusetts, opened Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea, a landmark exhibition featuring 82 works of art from 26 lending institutions, including 16 museums across the country.

On view at the Cape Ann Museum from June 30 through September 27, 2026, the exhibition is guest curated by Eliza Rathbone, Chief Curator Emerita at The Phillips Collection. Following its Gloucester debut, the exhibition will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, in October 2026—marking the first time an exhibition organized by the Cape Ann Museum will tour to a national museum.

The exhibition also coincides with the reopening of the Museum’s main campus after 20 months of closure for renovations and improvements, following an unprecedented $23 million fundraising campaign, far exceeding the Museum’s original $18 million goal.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity to tell the story of the close friendship among these major artists as they summered together on Cape Ann in Massachusetts from the 1920s to the 1940s, influencing one another’s careers as they went on to garner international renown,” said Oliver Barker, the Cape Ann Museum’s Director. “Their time together painting and drawing along the shores of Gloucester left a lasting mark on them individually and on the broader art world. This is the first exhibition to explore the three friends together, and it is a great honor for the Cape Ann Museum to organize the show in partnership with The Phillips Collection, bringing to light many works that audiences have not previously had the opportunity to see. It is especially meaningful as we welcome back visitors to the Museum’s main campus with this historic exhibition.”


Adolph Gottlieb, Blue at Night, 1957. Oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. John Barton Payne Fund, 1958, 58.13.4. Photo credit: Troy Wilkinson. © 2025 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

The artists, Milton Avery (1885-1965), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970), met in New York City and were drawn to Gloucester by Avery, who first visited in the 1920s. As the oldest of the three, Avery introduced his younger friends to Cape Ann in the 1930s. Their time together in Gloucester and beyond sparked creative developments that would define their careers. Works on view—many never before seen—highlight their shared experiences by the sea, including Avery’s coastal scenes, Rothko’s early seaside figures, and Gottlieb’s beach box motifs.

Avery, an American modernist well-known for his representational art in the mid-1920s, is not typically associated with Gottlieb and Rothko, who were internationally known for abstract art and their connection to the New York School in the 1950s.

Through sketches, watercolors, and monumental canvases, the exhibition traces each artist’s evolution, from identifiable scenes of Gloucester Harbor to the abstract imagery of the 1950s and ‘60s. This unprecedented exhibit and accompanying catalog, published and released by Rizzoli Electa, reveals the deep connections between these artists, emphasizing their role as both mentors and peers, while showcasing the unique working methods and lifelong friendship that shaped their groundbreaking art.

Rathbone, who has contributed to several major publications about Rothko and curated shows about Avery and Gottlieb for The Phillips Collection, has uncovered intriguing details, shedding new light on how the artists collaborated on Cape Ann during those summers.

“So many artists, from Edward and Josephine Hopper to Winslow Homer and John Sloan, discovered Cape Ann’s magnificent light and other natural qualities for painting and creating art,” Rathbone said. “It has been eye-opening for me to explore how Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko were among them, too. How the three artists worked together and were inspired by one another, although working in very different styles of painting and drawing, tells an interesting —yet mostly untold—story about American art during those years.”


Adolph Gottlieb, Boxes on the Beach, undated (c.1938). Oil on canvas. Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. © 2025 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Being near the ocean factored prominently in all three artists' works. For Avery, his sketches led to numerous watercolors and oil paintings of the sea, rocks, boats, birds, and bathers. For Rothko, the sea was more of a metaphor for the unconscious and a means to explore ancient myths abstractly. For Gottlieb, his Gloucester paintings of boxes on the beach led to his Pictographs, a series of paintings from the 1940s and early 1950s. In the case of each artist, their small sketches, created over these summers, evolved into prodigious canvases, both of which will also be on view in the show.

“It is an honor to present this exhibition, which sheds light on a lesser-known chapter in the careers of three influential American artists. The Phillips Collection has long championed Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko, being the first US museum to acquire Avery’s work, establishing the first permanent Rothko Room in 1960, and collecting iconic paintings by Gottlieb. This exhibition reflects our ongoing commitment to these artists’ legacies and to advancing scholarship in American modernism,” said Jonathan P. Binstock, the Vradenburg Director and CEO of The Phillips Collection, which is lending 10 works of art, four of which will be shown at the Cape Ann Museum. The Phillips Collection will host the exhibition from October 24, 2026, through January 24, 2027.

Numerous works have been loaned from the artists’ family collections as well as from major museums and institutions across the country. The 16 lending museums include the National Gallery of Art—which is contributing ten works by Mark Rothko—the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (The Albert Pilavin Memorial Collection of 20th-Century American Art), the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and the Cape Ann Museum.


Milton Avery, Harbor at Night, 1932. Oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Acquired 1942, 0038. © 2026 The Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Rizzoli catalogue, edited by Eliza Rathbone, includes contributions from March Avery Cavanaugh, daughter of Milton and Sally Avery; Sean Cavanaugh, Avery’s grandson and Director of the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation; Dr. Christopher Rothko, son of Mark Rothko and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Rothko Chapel in Houston; Kate Rothko Prizel, daughter of Mark Rothko and retired physician; Martha Oaks, the Cape Ann Museum’s Henrietta Gates and Heaton Robertson Chief Curator; Dr. Adam Greenhalgh, Associate Curator at the National Gallery of Art; Reneé Maurer, Associate Curator at The Phillips Collection; and Patricia Favero, Conservator at The Phillips Collection.

This major show and the Museum’s reopening culminates the celebrations of the institution's 150th Anniversary in 2025-26. Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea will be the first exhibition to mark the confluence of these milestone achievements. In 2023, the Cape Ann Museum also broke records for attendance with the critically acclaimed exhibition, Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape.